Australian election campaign begins

Julia Gillard has kicked off her campaign to become the first female prime
minister to be elected by the Australian people, calling on the country to "give
me your trust and look to the future".

Australia's Prime Minister Julia GillardPhoto: REUTERS

By Bonnie Malkin in Sydney

9:21AM BST 17 Jul 2010

On a clear, cold winter's morning in the capital Canberra, Ms Gillard visited Yarralumla, the home of the Queen's representative Governor-General Quentin Bryce, to ask her to dissolve parliament and set an election date for Aug 21.

The battle between Ms Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott is expected to focus on asylum seekers, economic management, education and climate change.

In her speech announcing the election date and setting out her priorities for the country Ms Gillard, appealed to the Australian people to "look forward, not back", saying that the Liberal party's gaze was "fixed in the rear view mirror" and that Mr Abbott was "in climate change denial".

Invoking her personal history as a young migrant to Australia from Barry Island in Wales, Ms Gillard pledged to protect jobs and strengthen the economy and improve the education system.

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"I believe in the transformative power of a high quality education, the kind of high quality education that with rigour and discipline enables a child to get the skills and the character that they will need for the rest of their life," she said.

"Now I learned these values in my family home, from my father and my mother who migrated to this country and, like millions of other Australians, worked unbelievably hard so that their children could have opportunities that they could never have dreamed for themselves."

Mr Abbott, speaking from one of the election's key battle grounds, Brisbane, countered bluntly that Ms Gillard represented "a bad government that deserves to lose".

"Why should people trust Julia Gillard when even Kevin Rudd couldn't?" he said, repeating a coalition charge that Ms Gillard still has blood on her hands over Mr Rudd's political assassination.

Taking aim at Ms Gillard's unofficial campaign mantra "Moving forward", which she repeated 20 times in her election speech, Mr Abbott said: "The prime minister wants to move forward, because the recent past is so littered with her failures."

The political rivals present a stark choice to the electorate. Ms Gillard is a non-married atheist from a working class Welsh family with a passion for employee rights and a background in left-wing politics. Mr Abbott, a devout Catholic who once trained as a priest, was brought up in affluence in one of Sydney's smartest suburbs and attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

Their style of leadership is also greatly at odds. While Ms Gillard is considered to be warm, calm and in control, with an unrivalled toughness at her core, Mr Abbott is known as a maverick whose tendency for straight talk can get him into trouble. Last month, he admitted he doesn't always say what he really means, and candidly warned voters that not everything he says should be considered as "the Gospel truth". While Ms Gillard likes to relax in front of the television, Mr Abbott is something of an action man, and can often be spotted diving into the waters off Sydney's beaches, sporting little more than his favourite skin-tight "budgie smugglers".

As well as the personalities, the election will be fought over policy.

The most sensitive policy in Australia, which is bombarded with images of asylum seekers arriving by boat from Indonesia on an almost daily basis, is border protection.

In her few short weeks in power Ms Gillard has attempted to neutralise fears that that Labour is soft on immigration by proposing that asylum seekers arriving in Australian waters by boat could be sent to East Timor to have their claims assessed - a policy that bears all the hallmarks of John Howard's controversial Pacific Solution.

Mr Abbott, whose tough approach to immigration has won him strong support in Labour's marginal seats, has pledged simply to "send the boats back".

Mr Abbott also has an absolutist approach to climate change, another issue that will colour the election result. Australia is the biggest per capita emitter of carbon in the world and is vulnerable to climate change, with drought affecting large swaths of the country.

Ms Gillard believes that a carbon price to fight climate change is inevitable, with a emissions trading scheme possibly brought in after 2012-13, while Mr Abbott, who once said that man-made global warming was "absolute crap", has said his party isn't interested in "a big new tax".

The pair are also likely to clash over the government's plans to tax the mining industry and economic management. Under Mr Rudd, the Australian economy deftly sidestepped the global financial crisis, but the country is now in debt - a word that strikes horror into the heart of the Australian electorate. Ms Gillard has admitted that she is facing "a close, tough, hard fought campaign".

Despite that prediction, Labour is the narrow favourite to win. The latest poll puts the government on 54.5 per cent and the Liberal National Coalition on 45.5 per cent. A separate poll found that Ms Gillard had a 21 percentage point lead over Mr Abbott as preferred prime minister.

History also falls in Ms Gillard's favour: Australians haven't voted out a first term government since 1932. And there is a tinge of Gillardmania sweeping the country that must be taken into account. In an unusual display of politician-worship, hundreds of people gathered outside Government House to clap and cheer Ms Gillard as her car passed by en route to meet the Governor-General. One member of the crowd held a banner proclaiming "Go girl, Julia for PM", while one man could be heard shouting: "She looked absolutely hot!".

Tony Abbott's reception by the people has so far been slightly cooler, and he has acknowledged that his party is the underdog. But the former boxer is ready for the fight. The Coalition needs a swing of just 2.3 per cent to form government, or eight extra seats.

Analysts in Australia have predicted that the election will be won and lost in Queensland. The Sunshine State has 16 marginal seats, which both parties will be fighting over furiously. The importance of the state was underlined when Ms Gillard, fresh from announcing the poll date, rushed to the airport to board a plane to Brisbane, her first campaign stop.

Professor John Warhurst, politics professor at the Australian National University, said that both candidates had everything to play for.

"Abbott is unpredictable and does tend to oversimplify and exaggerate but he does have this ability to communicate and he does present well," he said.

"Gillard has gone for the middle ground very clearly, and people have responded well to her as the first female prime minister.